Replace sugar and bananas with money from Reggae and Soca.

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Author: Wilkinson, Bert1

For two days in the last week, top Caribbean entertainers and policy makers sat down in a room in Kingston, Jamaica trying to persuade regional governments to begin giving the same attention to the regional creative industry as they have to sugar and bananas. The importance of these products is on the decline because of eroding international trade preferences.

Internationally acclaimed entertainers like Eddie Grant, president of Barbados-based Ice Records, and Ebo Cooper, one of the founders of Third World reggae band, led the charge to flip the thinking of regional prime ministers away from traditional products like sugar, bananas, rice and rum, all failing because of new trading rules being issued by the World Trade Organization (WTO).

"Music and other forms of our creative talent have to become the new economic leaders of the Caribbean given the imminent collapse of sugar and bananas. We have to be ready to accept the inevitable. Music is all pervasive, but sugar and bananas are not," said Grant who made millions from his "Electric Avenue" release in the mid 1980's.

Big name entertainers like Sting and the Rolling Stones have frequently recorded at Ice Records. Guyana-born Grant was also owner of the British group the Equals in the 1970s.

The crux of the argument of people like Grant and Cooper is that regional policy makers and foreign ministries have for decades thrown their collective energies into defending age-old trade and market access preferences while neglecting a creative industry that has produced the likes of Grant, Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Sean Paul and the Mighty Sparrow, the undisputed calypso king of the world.

The time to end that has come, said Grant, echoing recent warnings from Caribbean Community Chairman Prime Minister Patrick Manning of Trinidad. Manning had urged the region to get out of sugar and bananas, warning that they are both at death's door.

To bolster Grant's and Cooper's case, Patricia Francis, President of the Jamaican Investment and Trade Promotion Agency (Jampro) said that even without formal accounting, individual artists bring in more annual revenues than any of the region's traditional exports.

"Sean Paul, for example, makes more in sales than revenues from bananas," she said.

Officials like Lincoln Prince of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (RNM) based in Barbados admit to neglect of music, film, theater, and craft industries, among others.

The Caribbean reality is that we have a fading old economy of sugar, rice, rum and bananas. We have not taken the creative industry seriously and there will be social fallout if we do not do so quickly. The time has also come to commercialize things like our carnivals," he said during a heated question and answer session at the two-day workshop.

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By Bert Wilkinson, Special to the AmNews